Before I met Jonathan Schell, I already knew him in the best way possible: on the page. Even in his days as a neophyte journalist in Vietnam, he committed a writer's greatest act of generosity. First in the pages of The New Yorker, and then in his books, he took readers to places most of us never could have gone on our own — to The Village of Ben Suc, for instance, as American troops cleared it of its 3,500 peasant inhabitants and destroyed it in what was, in 1967, the largest military operation of the Vietnam War to date; and, not so long after, in The Military Half — from the back seats of tiny Forward Air Control planes — to two South Vietnamese provinces where Americans were wreaking utter havoc. (In that book, he offered a still-unmatched journalistic vision of what war looks like, up close and personal, from the air.) In the 1970s, in The Time of Illusion, he would seat us all front-row center at the great Constitutional crisis that preceded our present one, the Nixonian near coup d'état that we now call "Watergate."

In The Unconquerable World (for which I was the editor), looking back from a new century, he considered several hundred years of growing state violence that culminated in a single weapon capable of destroying all before it — and the various paths, violent and nonviolent, by which the people of this planet refused to heed the wishes of a seemingly endless series of putative imperial masters. I needed to know no more to feel sure, in March 2003, that the shock-and-awe fantasies of the Bush administration would be just that. In other words, he made me seem prophetic at Tomdispatch.

But if one subject has been his, it's been the nuclear issue. Like me, he came into this world more or less with the Bomb (a word which, back when it represented the only world-destroying thing around, we tended to capitalize) and its exterminatory possibilities have never left his thoughts. In his bestselling The Fate of the Earth, as the 1980s began (and an antinuclear movement grew), he approached the subject in print, beginning famously: "Since July 16, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was detonated, at the Trinity test site, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, mankind has lived with nuclear weapons in its midst." And so, sadly, we continue to do, despite his best efforts. He returned to the subject (when critics claimed he had no "solution" to the nuclear conundrum he had so vividly laid out) in The Abolition in 1984, and again in the post-Cold War 1990s, in The Gift of Time, The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, when the vast arsenals of the two superpowers were still sitting there like great unmentionable embarrassments, mission-less and yet going nowhere fast. (It was, of course, a time when people largely preferred to pretend that the nuclear danger was a thing of the past.)

Now 62 years old, the bomb (which, long ago, lost its capital B) is no longer an embarrassment, no longer mission-less. The old Cold War arsenals are being updated; possession of the weaponry has spread; and the Bush administration, which drove the American people to war partly with nuclear fantasies, has made such weapons, whether real or imagined, the heart and soul of its imperial policies — and again, there is a Jonathan Schell book to guide us. Think of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger as a brilliant intervention, an essential guidebook to a world gone mad in a new way.

It begins: "The nuclear age has entered its seventh decade. If it were a person, it would be thinking about retirement — reckoning up its pension funds, weighing different medical plans. But historical periods, unlike human lives, have no fixed limit, and the nuclear age is in fact displaying youthful vigor." From there on, short as it is, it never slows down. So consider Jonathan Schell's latest on nuclear Pakistan below and then pick up The Seventh Decade, which is officially published today. Tom

Are You With Us… or Against Us?

The Road from Washington to Karachi to Nuclear Anarchy
By Jonathan Schell

The journey to the martial law just imposed on Pakistan by its self-appointed president, the dictator Pervez Musharraf, began in Washington on September 11, 2001. On that day, it so happened, Pakistan's intelligence chief, Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He was summoned forthwith to meet with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who gave him perhaps the earliest preview of the global Bush doctrine then in its formative stages, telling him, "You are either one hundred percent with us or one hundred percent against us."

The next day, the administration, dictating to the dictator, presented
seven demands that a Pakistan that wished to be "with us" must meet.
These concentrated on gaining its cooperation in assailing
Afghanistan's Taliban regime, which had long been nurtured by the
Pakistani intelligence services in Afghanistan and had, of course,
harbored Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps. Conspicuously
missing was any requirement to rein in the activities of Mr. A.Q. Khan,
the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear arms, who, with the knowledge of
Washington, had been clandestinely hawking the country's nuclear-bomb
technology around the Middle East and North Asia for some years.

Musharraf decided to be "with us"; but, as in so many countries, being
with the United States in its Global War on Terror turned out to mean not
being with one's own people. Although Musharraf, who came to power in a
coup in 1999, was already a dictator, he had now taken the politically
fateful additional step of very visibly subordinating his dictatorship
to the will of a foreign master. In many countries, people will endure
a homegrown dictator but rebel against one who seems to be imposed from
without, and Musharraf was now courting this danger.

A public opinion poll
in September ranking certain leaders according to their popularity
suggests what the results have been. Osama bin Laden, at 46% approval,
was more popular than Musharraf, at 38%, who in turn was far better
liked than President Bush, at a bottom-scraping 7%. There is every
reason to believe that, with the imposition of martial law, Musharraf's
and Bush's popularity have sunk even further. Wars, whether on terror
or anything else, don't tend to go well when the enemy is more popular
than those supposedly on one's own side.

Are You with Us?

Even before the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq, the
immediate decision to bully Musharraf into compliance defined the shape
of the policies that the President would adopt toward a far larger
peril that had seemed to wane after the Cold War, but now was clearly
on the rise: the gathering nuclear danger. President Bush proposed what
was, in fact if not in name, an imperial solution to it. In the new
dispensation, nuclear weapons were not to be considered good or bad in
themselves; that judgment was to be based solely on whether the nation
possessing them was itself judged good or bad (with us, that is, or
against us). Iraq, obviously, was judged to be "against us" and
suffered the consequences. Pakistan, soon honored by the administration
with the somehow ridiculous, newly coined status of "major non-NATO
ally," was clearly classified as with us, and so, notwithstanding its
nuclear arsenal and abysmal record on proliferation, given the highest
rating.

That doctrine constituted a remarkable shift. Previously, the United
States had joined with almost the entire world to achieve
nonproliferation solely by peaceful, diplomatic means. The great
triumph of this effort had been the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty,
under which 183 nations, dozens quite capable of producing nuclear
weapons, eventually agreed to remain without them. In this
dispensation, all nuclear weapons were considered bad, and so all
proliferation was bad as well. Even existing arsenals, including those
of the two superpowers of the Cold War, were supposed to be liquidated
over time. Conceptually, at least, one united world had faced one
common danger: nuclear arms.

In the new, quickly developing, post-9/11 dispensation, however, the
world was to be divided into two camps. The first, led by the United
States, consisted of good, democratic countries, many possessing the
bomb; the second consisted of bad, repressive countries trying to get
the bomb and, of course, their terrorist allies. Nuclear peril, once
understood as a problem of supreme importance in its own right, posed
by those who already possessed nuclear weapons as well as by potential
proliferators, was thus subordinated to the polarizing "war on terror,"
of which it became a mere sub-category, albeit the most important one.
This peril could be found at "the crossroads of radicalism and
technology," otherwise called the "nexus of terror and weapons of mass
destruction," in the words of the master document of the Bush Doctrine,
the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

The good camp was assigned the job not of rolling back all nuclear
weapons but simply of stopping any members of the bad camp from getting
their hands on the bomb. The means would no longer be diplomacy, but
"preventive war" (to be waged by the United States). The global Cold
War of the late twentieth century was to be replaced by global wars
against proliferation — disarmament wars — in the twenty-first. These
wars, breaking out wherever in the world proliferation might threaten,
would not be cold, but hot indeed, as the invasion of Iraq soon
revealed — and as an attack on Iran, now under consideration in
Washington, may soon further show.

…Or Against Us?

Vetting and sorting countries into the good and the bad, the with-us
and the against-us, proved, however, a far more troublesome business
than those in the Bush administration ever imagined. Iraq famously was
not as "bad" as alleged, for it turned out to lack the key feature that
supposedly warranted attack — weapons of mass destruction. Neither was
Pakistan, muscled into the with-us camp so quickly after 9/11, as
"good" as alleged. Indeed, these distinctions were entirely artificial,
for by any factual and rational reckoning, Pakistan was by far the more
dangerous country.

Indeed, the Pakistan of Pervez Musharraf has, by now, become a
one-country inventory of all the major forms of the nuclear danger.

*Iraq did not have nuclear weapons; Pakistan did. In 1998, it had
conducted a series of five nuclear tests in response to five tests by
India, with whom it had fought three conventional wars since its
independence in 1947. The danger of interstate nuclear war between the
two nations is perhaps higher than anywhere else in the world.

*Both Iraq and Pakistan were dictatorships (though the Iraqi government was incomparably more brutal).

*Iraq did not harbor terrorists; Pakistan did, and does so even more today.

*Iraq, lacking the bomb, could not of course be a nuclear proliferator.
Pakistan was, with a vengeance. The arch-proliferator A.Q. Khan, a
metallurgist, first purloined nuclear technology from Europe, where he
was employed at the uranium enrichment company EURENCO. He then used
the fruits of his theft to successfully establish an enrichment program
for Pakistan's bomb. After that, the thief turned salesman. Drawing on
a globe-spanning network of producers and middlemen — in Turkey, Dubai,
and Malaysia, among other countries — he peddled his nuclear wares to
Iran, Iraq (which apparently turned down his offer of help), North
Korea, Libya, and perhaps others. Seen from without, he had established
a clandestine multinational corporation dedicated to nuclear
proliferation for a profit.

Seen from within Pakistan, he had managed to create a sort of
independent nuclear city-state — a state within a state — in effect
privatizing Pakistan's nuclear technology. The extent of the
government's connivance in this enterprise is still unknown, but few
observers believe Khan's far-flung operations would have been possible
without at least the knowledge of officials at the highest levels of
that government. Yet all this activity emanating from the "major
non-NATO ally" of the Bush administration was overlooked until late
2003, when American and German intelligence intercepted a shipload of
nuclear materials bound for Libya, and forced Musharraf to place Khan,
a national hero owing to his work on the Pakistani bomb, under house
arrest. (Even today, the Pakistani government refuses to make Khan
available for interviews with representatives of the International
Atomic Energy Agency.)

*Iraqi apparatchiks could not, of course, peddle to terrorists,
al-Qaedan or otherwise, technology they did not have, as Bush suggested
they would do in seeking to justify his war. The Pakistani
apparatchiks, on the other hand, could — and they did. Shortly before
September 11, 2001, two leading scientists from Pakistan's nuclear
program, Dr. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the former Director General of
the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and Chaudry Abdul Majeed, paid a
visit to Osama bin Laden around a campfire in Afghanistan to advise him
on how to make or acquire nuclear arms. They, too, are under house
arrest.

If, however, the beleaguered Pakistani state, already a balkanized
enterprise (as the A.Q. Khan story shows) is overthrown, or if the
country starts to fall apart, the danger of insider defections from the
nuclear establishment will certainly rise. The problem is not so much
that the locks on the doors of nuclear installations — Pakistan's approximately 50 bombs
are reportedly spread at sites around the country — will be broken or
picked as that those with the keys to the locks will simply switch
allegiances and put the materials they guard to new uses. The "nexus"
of terrorism and the bomb, the catastrophe the Bush Doctrine was
specifically framed to head off, might then be achieved — and in a
country that was "for us."

What has failed in Pakistan, as in smashed Iraq, is not just a regional
American policy, but the pillars and crossbeams of the entire global
Bush doctrine, as announced in late 2001. In both countries, the
bullying has failed; popular passions within each have gained the upper
hand; and Washington has lost much of its influence. In its application
to Pakistan, the doctrine was framed to stop terrorism, but in that
country's northern provinces, terrorists have, in fact, entrenched
themselves to a degree unimaginable even when the Taliban protected
Al-Qaeda's camps before September 11th.

If the Bush Doctrine laid claim to the values of democracy, its man
Musharraf now has the distinction, rare even among dictators, of
mounting a second military coup to maintain the results of his first
one. In a crowning irony, his present crackdown is on democracy
activists, not the Taliban, armed Islamic extremists, or al-Qaeda
supporters who have established positions in the Swat valley only 150 miles from Islamabad.

Most important, the collapsed doctrine has stoked the nuclear fires it
was meant to quench. The dangers of nuclear terrorism, of
proliferation, and even of nuclear war (with India, which is dismayed
by developments in Pakistan as well as the weak Bush administration
response to them) are all on the rise. The imperial solution to these
perils has failed. Something new is needed, not just for Pakistan or
Iraq, but for the world. Perhaps now someone should try to invent a
solution based on imperialism's opposite, democracy, which is to say
respect for other countries and the wills of the people who live in
them.

Jonathan Schell is the author of The Fate of the Earth, among other books, and the just-published The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger. He is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute, and a visiting lecturer at Yale University.